Why do I have two instances of ssh? Ie one for root and one for my username cd?

09-25-2008

matsp

One is the actual daemon that runs the ssh base-protocol. But since that HAS to run as root, you don't want that process to actually perform your commands on the other end, so it forks and resets the user-id to your personal user-id [it actually will do that even if you are logged in as root, since it still wants to run all commands for one session in one process, rather than having a bunch of commands come into the same process from differens sessions, that would be hard to track - for example, you would have to deal with multiple "current working directory" for two different sessions - messy].